Costs for adapting to climate change largely underestimated

Scientists led by a former co-chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will warn that the UN negotiations aimed at tackling climate change are based on substantial underestimates of what it will cost to adapt to its impacts.

The real costs of adaptation are likely to be two to three times greater than estimates for the year 2030 made by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) in 2007, according to new report published on 27 August by the International Institute for Environment and Development and the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at Imperial College London.

In 2007 the UNFCCC estimated the global costs of adapting to climate change to be US$40–170 billion each year. But the report’s authors say that these estimates were produced too quickly and did not include key sectors such as energy, manufacturing, retailing, mining, tourism and ecosystems.